1. The Website Quality
of the Regional Tourist Boards
in the Alps: Ten Years Later
Luisa Mich
ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 1
Department of Industrial Engineering
University of Trento, Italy

2. Agenda
• Goal of the study and context:
– Re-evaluating the quality of the official B2C websites of the Alpine
regions to check their evolution
• Method:
ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 2
• Method:
– Cross-country analysis applying an updated evaluation table
derived from the 7Loci met-model
• Results:
– almost all the websites have improved their quality, but there are
margins of improvement

3. Goal of the study & context: 1
• Tourism plays an important role for the
Economy of the Alps
• The organization of the tourism sector in
the Alps is based essentially on regional
ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 3
• The organization of the tourism sector in
the Alps is based essentially on regional
tourism boards (RTBs)
• The quality of the alpine RTBs websites was
evaluated in a large project on tourism in
the Alps realized from 2000 to 2003

4. Goal of the study & context: 2
• An in-depth evaluation of the official
websites of the RTBs highlighted a number
of best practices and critical issues as well
• Ten years later, the RTBs’ awareness of:
ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 4
• Ten years later, the RTBs’ awareness of:
– the importance of their role as destination
management organisations (DMOs), and
– building up and maintaining a quality website
has increased

5. Goal of the study and context: 3
• The last decade has seen significant
changes in the Web:
– the term Web 2.0 was not popular yet (O’Reilly
wrote his seminal article in 2005)
ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 5
wrote his seminal article in 2005)
– many of social networking websites like
Facebook or Twitter did not exist
• Ten years later, we re-evaluated the quality
of the B2C websites of the RTBs of the Alps,
to update the results obtained in 2002

6. Method: 1
• Set-up phase:
– revision of the URLs of the websites of the
RTBs included in the first project
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RTBs included in the first project
– revision of the evaluation table, to take into
account the evolution of the technologies and
of the DMOs web presence strategies

7. Method: 2
• URLs of the RTBs websites: 46% of have modified
their URLs
– some RTBs have adopted a more intuitive and
meaningful domain name, e.g., suedtirol vs. hallo,
visittrentino vs. trentino; or shorter domain name e.g.,
ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 7
visittrentino vs. trentino; or shorter domain name e.g.,
burgenland vs. burgenland-tourismus
– others have moved to new top-level domains, e.g., info
vs. .com, .it vs. .to
• Not all the changes are good:
– some RTBs have not redirected the old URLs to the
new ones (Piemonte, Veneto, Slovenia), or adopted an
URL that is still not intuitive (e.g., piemonteitalia.eu)

8. Method: 3
• The quality evaluation table:
– the model used in 2002 was defined in an iterative
process to ‘instantiate’ the 7loci meta-model and
contains 95 Boolean questions: Identity: 15; Content:
ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 8
contains 95 Boolean questions: Identity: 15; Content:
27; Services & Identification: 12; Maintenance: 8;
Usability: 18; Feasibility: 3
– the table had to be changed carefully to allow the
comparison of the results with those obtained in 2002
– 15 of the questions were modified and 13 new;
changes due to technical evolution, new tools, social
networking but also to ‘innovative’ features

9. Method: 4
• The evaluation table has been applied by experts
according to the following criteria:
– use the official language of the region
– evaluate Identity after Content and Services
– complete a parallel analysis of each dimension of the sites of the
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– complete a parallel analysis of each dimension of the sites of the
same nation (more homogeneous assessments without having to
open all the sites of the 26 RTBs)
– whenever possible, apply automatic tools
• If a region is known for different types of tourism, focus
on the section dedicated to the alpine tourism (all the
French regions and 4 out of 7of the Italian regions)

10. Results: 1
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11. Results: 2
Dimension - # of
questions
Identity
15
Content
27
Services
12
Identifi
cation
12
Mainte
nance
8
Usability
18
Feasibility
3
Region
Alto Adige 14 23 7 7 6 14 3
Friuli Venezia
Giulia
13 20 7 9 7 16 2
Lombardia 10 15 4 8 5 13 2
Piemonte 11 20 6 8 6 12 2
Trentino 15 23 8 11 8 17 3
Valle d’Aosta 14 24 6 4 8 16 3
Veneto 12 18 4 6 7 14 1
Burgerland 12 20 8 7 6 15 1
Kärnten 13 21 5 9 7 15 2
Oberösterreich 13 26 11 11 8 14 3
Niederösterreich 8 24 11 3 8 14 1
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Niederösterreich 8 24 11 3 8 14 1
Salzburger Land 14 21 10 9 4 14 3
Steiermark 14 24 10 8 7 14 2
Tirol 14 22 9 9 6 13 2
Vorarlberg 14 17 3 10 6 16 0
Graubünden 15 22 8 9 7 14 0
Berner Oberland 10 7 2 3 5 12 0
Zentralschweiz 9 2 3 2 6 11 0
Canton Ticino 14 23 6 10 6 17 2
Canton de Vaud 14 23 7 9 8 16 2
Valais 12 19 6 6 7 12 0
Riviera Côte-
d’Azur
13 21 7 10 7 12 0
Provence Alpes-
Côte d’Azur
12 2 5 7 5 8 1
Rhône-Alpes 10 17 2 8 5 10 0
Slovenia 13 24 6 10 6 17 3
Bayern 13 23 8 9 8 16 3

12. Results: 3
Region Nation 2012 2002
Oberösterreich A 91% 80%
Trentino I 89% 77%
Bayern D 84% 73%
Canton de Vaud CH 83% 58%
Slovenia SLO 83% 62%
Steiermark A 83% 74%
Canton Ticino CH 82% 83%
Graubünden CH 79% 70%
Salzburger Land A 79% 66%
Tirol A 79% 79%
Valle d’Aosta I 79% 67%
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Valle d’Aosta I 79% 67%
Alto Adige I 78% 68%
Friuli Venezia Giulia I 78% 60%
Kärnten A 76% 70%
Riviera Côte-d’Azur F 74% 64%
Niederösterreich A 73% 75%
Burgenland A 73% 74%
Vorarlberg A 69% 75%
Piemonte I 68% 54%
Veneto I 65% 46%
Valais CH 65% 66%
Lombardia I 60% 62%
Rhône-Alpes F 55% 65%
Provence Alpes-Côte d’Azur F 42% 63%
Berner Oberland CH 41% 45%
Zentralschweiz CH 35% 50%

13. Results: 4
• Main result of the comparison:
– the adoption of better technologies or a
graphical redesign of the websites, which is the
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graphical redesign of the websites, which is the
case of most of the investigated websites, can
improve its quality, but a real improvement is
obtained only with the adoption of a more
structured organization for the RTB as DMO

14. Conclusion: 1
• The 2012 study shows that almost all the
websites have enhanced their quality
performances
• A RTB could compare its website with
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• A RTB could compare its website with
competitors and identify the weak points for the
7 loci of the quality table
• Results of the evaluation can be correctly
interpreted and used for decision making
activities only in the context of the tourism
strategy of a specific region

15. Conclusion: 2
• To better focus these results, they had to
be completed with the analysis of the
quality of the other online ‘presences’ of
ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 15
quality of the other online ‘presences’ of
the RTBs, that includes social networks’
profiles, apps et.